IV
Among Schumann’s contemporaries in song literature we may mention his wife Clara, his friend and rival Mendelssohn, together with several lesser known composers—Reinecke, Volkmann, and Jadassohn—and, finally, two important men, Chopin and Glinka. Clara Schumann (born 1819, Clara Josephine Wieck, died 1896) was a talented composer and a virtuoso pianist who worked throughout her married life in closest sympathy with her husband. Three of her songs appear in Schumann’s opus 37—namely, numbers 2, 4, and 11, Er ist gekommen, Liebst du um Schönheit, and Warum willst du and’re fragen? These songs must be ranked high, for their scholarly command of style and their general finish, though they are obviously not works of special inspiration. The best of the three is probably the second, in which the composer makes extensive use of one of her husband’s devices, that of repeating a single phrase in various forms and building up the song as out of a single shape of stone. The last named of the three songs also has a good melody to its credit.
Mendelssohn wrote many songs during his short lifetime and was probably the best known of all song-writers of the forties. But his work in this department has all but passed into oblivion. They are not ambitious efforts. They make no attempt to strike out new paths; they have no interest in sounding depths of emotion; they are content with the old forms and the old formulas of accompaniment. The best that can usually be said of them is that they are pleasing in melody and faultlessly graceful according to canons of correctness. On the whole, the ones best worth singing are those which are consciously volkstümlich. Among these we may name the very beautiful Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rath, opus 47, No. 7; O Jugend, O schöne Rosenzeit, opus 57, number 4; An die Entfernte, opus 71, number 3; and Das Lieblingsplätzchen, opus 99, number 3, words from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. ‘Italy,’ in opus 8, and Im Herbst, in opus 9, have a very real charm. Neue Liebe, in opus 19, suggesting the elf riding through the forest, is about as near as Mendelssohn ever got to descriptive music in his accompaniments. The Frühlingslied in opus 71 is by all means one of the best of his songs, showing contrast and depth of mood and rising to a thrilling climax on the words Bist nicht allein.
Another song writer of peculiarly Germanic cast was Karl Reinecke (born 1821), friend of Schumann and Mendelssohn and protégé of the latter, who was for thirty-five years director of the Gewandhaus concerts at Leipzig. Reinecke’s songs cannot be called great, but they have to a remarkable degree insinuated themselves into the affections of the German people. They are at their best when they are nearest to the Volkslied, showing the German genius of achieving deep and noble expression in the simplest forms. We may mention especially the Children’s Songs, opus 37, of which the best are the lilting lullaby, Wenn die Kinder schlafen ein, and the moving Gebet zur Nacht. The essential wholesomeness of his talent is shown in the Singspiel, Ein Abenteuer Händels (‘An Adventure of Handel’s), of which the very simple song, Lied so treu und herzlich, is typical. His song cycle, Schneewittchen (for soprano and contralto with chorus of women’s voices), is excellent in its way. The simple prologue is a thing of great beauty, and Schneewittchen’s song, In seiner Kammer, has a charming archaic style, recalling the long and flowing lines of the Minnesong. Salomon Jadassohn (1831-1901) and Robert Volkmann (1815-1883) were likewise successful song writers whose lyric work has largely passed into obscurity. Carl Friedrich Curschmann (1805-1841), a pupil of Spohr, was a prolific and extremely popular writer of songs in a sentimental and popular vein, marked by the sensuous quality which Franz Abt used so richly. An artist of more varied talents was Karl Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert (1811-1891), who held important official positions in Berlin, chiefly in the Royal Opera, and composed numerous songs. The best of these are the Kinderlieder, of which the charming ‘Lullaby’ is still popular.
Chopin’s Polish Songs, opus 74, are his only vocal works. They purport to be arrangements of Polish folk-songs, but it is to be doubted whether they are to any great extent popular melodies. Probably Chopin drew freely on Polish motives and rearranged them to suit himself. However that may be, some of them are masterpieces. ‘The Maiden’s Wish’ is well known to concert audiences through Liszt’s arrangement of it for piano. The Bacchanal is a glorious piece, admirable for an encore number, the simplest of quatrain tunes, but overpowering in its frenzied energy. ‘The Spring’ is a charming thing, undoubtedly of folk origin, a tender alternation of major and minor which would become monotonous except for its ineffable beauty. ‘Melancholy,’ a folk-like tune with a genuine Slavic touch, is likewise among the best, and ‘My Sweetheart,’ which recalls the Tyrolese folk-songs, is well worth knowing. These songs are of the simplest character. The last two of the collection, the ‘Lithuanian Song’ and ‘Poland’s Funeral Song,’ are more pretentious—rather like scenas than Lieder—and in spite of certain beauties are overweighted with pretense.
Another song writer who does not usually find his way into song lists should be mentioned here. This is Michail Ivanovitch Glinka (1804-1857), founder of the national school of Russian music. Glinka was a man of remarkable talent, one who was able to fuse Italian grace, French subtlety, and German solidity into an individual style of his own, and to develop out of it an original native touch which had never appeared before in Russian music. Of his eighty-five or more songs (exclusive of those in his operas) a great number are in the thin and pretentious style of the day. But from a few of them there speaks real genius—the forerunner of the wonderful Russian song literature of recent times. The grand Hebrew Song from the incidental music to ‘Prince Kholmsky’ is the work of a man in whom much learning could not stifle the personal message. Another song, ‘Our Rose,’ is in a mixed rhythm which foreshadows the wonderful songs of Moussorgsky, and yet another, a ‘Traveller’s Song,’ makes use of the lively two-four rhythm which has since come to be associated with the Russian Cossacks. The lyric known as ‘Ilia’s Song’ and that entitled ‘Deserted Land’ both show the personal genius of the composer. We should also mention ‘Doubt,’ Meine Ruh’ ist hin, and ‘The Lark’ as among his best. It is not likely that singers will dig up these old songs for study, but Glinka’s distinguished name should not be forgotten in the examination of the wonderful Russian song literature which took its rise from him.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] Vol. II, Chapter VI.
[24] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
[25] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
CHAPTER X
THE CONTEMPORARIES OF SCHUBERT AND SCHUMANN
The spirit of the ‘thirties’ in France; the lyric poets of the French romantic period—Monpou and Berlioz—Song-writers of Italy; English song-writers—Robert Frans—Löwe and the art-ballad.
In another volume[26] we have seen what a remarkable wave of literary romanticism swept over France in the late twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century. There has rarely been an age of more pronounced lyricism, rarely an age which created in a short time so many excellent lyrics. There were a number of fine talents working at this time. The purely literary virtuosity was remarkable. The radicalism of their method was marked, and the strangeness of their product revealed a movement in all the vigor of its early youth. In their insistence on the sensuous quality of words the romanticists of the thirties looked forward to the France of the early twentieth century, with its hazy, indefinite outlines. The early romanticists reduced the sound of words to a fine art. The later impressionists reduced it almost to an exact science.
The central tenet of the romanticists was freedom—freedom from the old classic forms, freedom from a host of conventions which governed the French language in poetry, and freedom especially from the severity and reserve of the classic ideal. To the poet of the Napoleonic age any violence of manner was an error in taste. He shunned it as he would have shunned the smell of garlic on a peasant’s breath. To the poet of the age of Louis Philippe any conscious reserve of manner was a coldness, a lack of genuine human feeling, an artistic lie. The emotions as well as the artistic sense must be stirred. And they must be stirred both by the picturing of emotion and by the beauty of lovely sounds. We have occasion to notice throughout the art of the nineteenth century an increasing insistence on the sensuous (it cannot be too often repeated). It shows in every department of artistic life. In poetry it is shown in a development of the mellifluousness of rhythm and suggestiveness of word. The French romanticists did for French poetry what Shelley did for English and what Poe did for American. These three qualities—freedom, emotionalism, and sensuousness—we may accept as the dominant notes of French romantic poetry.
High above all literary men of the time towered Victor Hugo. This man, along with Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, was one of the greatest virtuosos of language the world has ever seen. Pity only that he had not the genius of the other three! To his time he seemed supreme. But since his death his reputation has been steadily declining. We have come to see how much of his work was only—language. He attained his emotional effects through emotional words rather than through emotional interpretation. He was incurably melodramatic and only his power of language saves a large share of his work from falling to the level of any yellow-back novel or the cheap theatre romance. He attempted to cover the whole of life—to interpret the criminal, the hero, and the child, as well as woman in every one of her moods and states. But through all the work, even the magnificent scenes of Les Misérables, the true human touch is somehow lacking. Everything is sacrificed to the great god Effect, to whom alone Hugo offered his most precious burnt offerings. Much of his work was in the form of short lyrics, but it is in this department that his reputation has suffered most in the half century just past. The lyric demands a naïveté which Hugo, already famous at the age of seventeen, never had. His lyric poems are always overweighted with their language, always too foreign to the spirit of the folk-poem, which is at the foundation of all lyric expression. They were, however, freely set to music, as was inevitable, and furnish a goodly share of the texts for the song literature of the time.
Lamartine in his lyric work suffered considerably from the disease of the time—over-emphasis. He ranked as a philosopher in his day—much the sort of philosopher which Maeterlinck pretends to be to-day. He had a goodly share of the didactic in his makeup, as Hugo never had (except toward the end of his life, when didacticism became the fashion). As a result we can hardly place Lamartine any higher than Hugo as a lyric poet. But his ardent religious sense, combined with his fine power over eloquent language, made him greatly loved in his day and as a result his texts enter largely into the song literature of the time. Béranger had much more of the true lyric in him. His language was simple, his message popular. He was always more at home in the streets than in the drawing room. In some ways he might be called the Kipling of his time. He appealed to the French sense of national pride, dwelling upon the glorious history of the past and the nobility of the French character with all the paraphernalia of the jingo poet. In particular he resuscitated, or rather created, the Napoleonic myth. The age in which he wrote was a new one, containing few of the immediate conditions of Napoleon’s time. A new generation had sprung up, a generation which had not experienced the heartaches and miseries of the Napoleonic wars, or else had forgotten them, and thought of the time only as the age in which France single-handed had defeated the whole of Europe. Napoleon was no longer the epileptic and egomaniac who had shattered the fine ideals of the French Revolution and for his own ambition brought France almost to the verge of ruin. He was now le petit caporal who had fought with his men on the bridge at Arcola, had eaten the same food and slept on the same hard ground with his army. The myth was tremendously attractive, and made it possible some twenty years later for a shallow adventurer to become Emperor of France (merely because he happened to be the nephew of the great Bonaparte) and bring France once more to the verge of ruin to please personal and dynastic ambition. In the creation of this myth Béranger’s sense of the picturesque and popular served him well. As a lyric poet, apart from the peculiar nature of his subject matter, he would hardly be remembered. The most genuine and most refined of the literary men of the time was Musset, for many years the lover of Georges Sand and Chopin’s successor in her affections. His work partook far less of the spectacular than that of his contemporaries. He was interested in interpreting the human soul and he did his work with the most delicate literary art. His inspiration was fresh and creative; his workmanship was finished to the last degree. It is a great pity that he had no Schubert to set his poems to music. A musician of the stature of Musset might have created a distinctive and great French song literature fifty years earlier than it came.